As you string combos together, you'll be able to dismember orcs with your final blows, lopping off arms, legs, and heads and getting experience multipliers for the ensuing carnage. While you won't see any naked elves running around or hear your dwarven warrior drop an F-bomb, the game does have a lot more blood and carnage than you might be expecting from a Lord of the Rings game. The Lord of the Rings: War in the North is the first M-rated game set in Middle Earth, a badge that the game wears with distinction. You'll pull off some fairly simplistic combos that result in some pretty nasty kills, but there's nothing too extravagant as far as swordplay is concerned. Your ranger will obviously be more adept at bow and arrow combat while your dwarf is pretty brutal with an axe, but they'll each be able to lean the other way when necessary.
The combat is a blend of melee and ranged combat, each of which you'll employ often, regardless of who you choose. The game's conversation system is largely inconsequential, as you'll talk to people only to learn some extended details of the tepid storyline. They're almost grim in their resolute focus, and any sense of levity that appears in the books and subsequent films is all but absent in War of the North. Your team of three, a human ranger, an elven mage, and a dwarven warrior, are completely engrossed on their mission, revealing very little in the way of any personality or reason for their quest aside from sheer valor. There is no such attachment with the characters in War in the North. When Boromir was shot down by a hail of Uruk-hai arrows, when Gandalf was pulled into the fiery depths while fending off the Balrog, you found yourself invested in the characters and heartbroken by the tragedy. One of the main ways that the original LOTR books and the recent films succeeded is that even though they were filled with tons of characters, you still found yourself caring about them. Orc slaying is just another thing best enjoyed in a group. In War in the North, you and your group of warriors (no soloing here if you don't have two friends to take control of the other two fighters, the AI will pick up the slack) must embark on a quest to (you guessed it) the North to defeat a new threat, Agandaur, one of Sauron's most deadly lieutenants. The gameplay doesn't take any real risks, as the combat is fairly simple, the RPG features are par for the course, and the story doesn't make any attempt to stand out in the backdrop of its established universe.
However, even with the significant carnage and orcish dismemberment, there's something too safe in War in the North. All of the familiar trappings of the action-RPG genre are here, from shops and loot to blacksmiths that repair weakened or busted weaponry as well as some combo-based sword (and axe) play. As three warriors placed in a new story set concurrently against the events in the LOTR trilogy, War in the North adds in a brand new plot, as well as an M rating due to some pretty brutal combat. War in the North is an action-RPG built with a strong focus on co-op.
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